by Cliff, Nigel
Xavier’s labors to improve the colonists’ morals evaporated in a sultry haze of indifference. After four years he gave up the struggle and wrote to King John, recommending that the Inquisition be installed at Goa as the only way to cleanse his colony. Xavier left for Indonesia, where his evangelism found a much more receptive audience, and died while trying to reach China several years before the Inquisition finally arrived.
By then Portugal had had more than half a century to shepherd Africa and India into the Catholic fold. Rome had begun to take a dim view of what it saw as Portuguese apathy, and it reminded the king that it had only given him authority over the lands he discovered on condition that he spread the faith. Since the quid pro quo seemed to have been forgotten, the Church threatened to throw open Asia to all comers. The threat worked, after a fashion. The colonial government offered rice to poor Hindus and jobs to the higher castes if they submitted to baptism. Many of the “Rice Christians” were dunked under water, took their reward, and carried on with life as normal.
In theory the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over Christians, but its first act was to outlaw the open practice of Hindu rites on pain of death. Having only recently been mistaken by Vasco da Gama and his contemporaries for Christians, Hindus found themselves herded into churches to hear their religion ridiculed and were subjected to a regime of discrimination that ranged from the petty—prohibitions against riding on horseback or being carried in palanquins—to the ruinous. At the latter end of the scale were bans on Christians employing Hindus and on Hindus employing Christians. More Indians lined up for baptism, failed to shake off their old habits of keeping small idols or chanting under their breath, and like the Rice Christians, found themselves caught under the Inquisition’s burning lens of religious purification.
Many “New Christians” who had fled the Inquisition in Portugal also became its victims in India. Hundreds were burned at the stake in the cathedral square, and thousands sought refuge in Muslim territory. Finally, the inquisitors turned on the St. Thomas Christians who had been so eager to give their allegiance to Vasco da Gama and his nation. In 1599, on the grounds that they practiced a heretical form of Eastern Christianity, they were converted en masse to Catholicism. Their books were burned, their ancient liturgical language was banned, and their priests were imprisoned and targeted by assassins. As the dungeons and torture chambers filled up, the inquisitors awarded themselves their victims’ property and connived with the colonial government to terrorize them into submitting to Portuguese control.
The Goan Inquisition was one of the most brutal and iniquitous of all those scandalous tribunals of the soul. It was also spectacularly unsuccessful. Obsessing over doctrinal purity was no way to convert people who came from radically different religious traditions. Missionaries who tried to understand those traditions and graft native churches onto them were much more effective, though some were persecuted by the Inquisition for their very success. The educated Jesuits, who on the whole were mercifully free of the inquisitors’ superiority complex, arrived in China, learned the language, and dressed their hair and beards in the local style; even though preaching in public meant instant death, they made large numbers of converts, among them influential mandarins and even a few regional governors. Yet they, too, were hampered by the rebarbative behavior of their Portuguese hosts, while Jean Mocquet had a typically caustic explanation for the missionaries’ grueling experiences in Japan. The Japanese, he reported,
who are a subtile and wary People, seeing that the design of the Portugals, after having made them Christians, was to dispossess them of their Lands and Goods by all inventions; therefore they did not care for their Amity, much less did they desire ’em to Govern, and this perhaps was one of the causes that they have Martyred so many Jesuits who were utterly innocent of all this: For these Japans are mightily Jealous of their Wives, and the Portugals had no other aim but to gain them, especially those of the greatest, with whom afterwards they do what they please.
“I have found out in the Indies,” Mocquet blisteringly added, “that the Whoredoms, Ambition, Avarice, and Greediness of the Portugals, has been one of the chiefest causes why the Indians become not Christians so easily.” For all the Frenchman’s anti-Portuguese prejudice, the missionaries had no hope of making major inroads without the sheltering umbrella of an effective empire, and many met with a martyr’s death.
Strangely, while Hindus and Christians were persecuted with increasing enthusiasm, the animus against Muslims that had driven Vasco da Gama to India was muted for a long while.
It was not for want of Muslim threats. In 1524 an Uzbeki warlord named Babur, who was terrifyingly descended from Tamerlane on his father’s side and Genghis Khan on his mother’s, rode into India through the mountain passes of Afghanistan. Babur had decided to retake his rightful inheritance, and he founded the Delhi Empire of the House of Timur, called by Europeans the Mughal Empire. The Mughals swept across northern India, but they had no navy to challenge Portugal’s supremacy at sea and the Portuguese pragmatically refused to fight them. More alarmingly for the Westerners, the increasingly almighty Ottoman Empire finally refocused its attention on the seaways of the East. Muslims and Christians fought sea battles from India to Indonesia, but the Ottomans never managed to project their naval power convincingly beyond the Red Sea. In 1538, a massed fleet of eighty warships set out from Egypt to wage “holy war . . . and to avenge the evil deeds of the Portuguese infidels” once and for all, but a second Battle of Diu ended in a comprehensive Portuguese victory and by 1557 the Turkish threat had lifted for good.
Closer to the hub of Portugal’s activities, the once-formidable Vijayanagar Empire finally fell in 1565 to the Muslim sultans across its borders. The sultans’ armies marched to the coasts to oust the Portuguese, and the colonists only held on to Goa after a brutal ten-month siege. Yet long before then, most of the empire’s freewheeling monopoly holders had decided it was more profitable to ally with Muslim merchants than to try to uproot them. So had the increasing numbers of wanted men and deserters from the fleets who wandered around Asia and Africa, married into local trading networks, and adopted the local lifestyle and beliefs. Many eked out a living as middlemen to the empire, which gradually became barely recognizable as a Portuguese empire at all. In East Africa a sort of mercenary convivencia was established, and it endured until the 1570s, when a young Portuguese king caught Crusading fever and sent new armies to massacre Muslims around the Indian Ocean.
As the sixteenth century drew to a close, the Crusader fleets petered out for good. The reason was simple. There were no longer enough Portuguese who were willing and available to sail to the East.
DEATH HAD ALWAYS stalked the explorers, but in an age that held life cheap the risk had been worth the reward. Men who lived in hope of heaven and fear of hell had been eager to serve as Crusaders; men born into poverty had hungered to touch the wealth of the East. Yet the wealth had stuck to the fingers of the elite, and faith had proved a poor defense against disease, famine, and storms. Even the devout had begun to wonder whether God had really chosen them to carry out His plan. Christians or not, Portugal’s greatest chronicler lamented in the mid-sixteenth century, “It seems that—on account of our sins or as a result of some judgment of God hidden from us—at the entrance to this great land of Ethiopia where our ships go, he placed a menacing angel with a sword of fire in the form of mortal fevers which prevent us from penetrating into the interior to find the springs which water this earthly garden and from which flow down into the sea, in so many of the regions we have conquered there, rivers of gold.”
In the three decades following Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, perhaps eighty thousand Portuguese men—and a few women—had set out for the colonies. Perhaps eight thousand had returned. For a nation of a million men, women, and children it was an insupportable loss. As the dreaded plague once again struck Portugal and cut down countless more lives, towns and villages across the kingdom emptied and sleepily decayed.
Complete collapse was only averted when the attractions of the East began to wear off.
The voyage around Africa had always been a deadly obstacle course. Now it had become tediously familiar, too. There were no new coastlines to explore, people to encounter, or stars to chart, and there was little hope of finding fabulous wealth at the end. The Portuguese still clung to the old system that separated sailors from soldiers and put both under the command of men qualified by birth rather than ability, and shipboard brawls became a depressingly regular feature of life at sea. They broke out all the more as merchants commissioned towering two-thousand-ton vessels that were built for their carrying capacity, not for seaworthiness or comfort. With their rearing castles and bulbous hulls the ships’ design had changed little since Vasco da Gama’s time, and the bigger they got, the more top-heavy and unstable they became. They were overloaded with goods and passengers, they were badly maintained and crewed by inexperienced hands and slaves, and out of every four, one met with disaster.
Of all the Portuguese vessels lost to shipwreck, piracy, and war, the fate of one reverberated on every subsequent voyage.
In February 1552 the São João left Cochin, its holds crammed with one of the greatest hauls of all time. It was late in the season, and it sailed into a storm near the Cape of Good Hope. The mainmast and rudder sheared off, and the ship crashed into the coast of Natal. A hundred and twenty survivors—among them the captain, a nobleman named Manuel de Sousa de Sepúlveda, and his wife, Dona Leonor—dragged themselves ashore with as many valuables as they could stuff under their clothes. They had no provisions, they were soon parched and starving, and when they encountered a group of Africans, they asked to be taken to their king.
The king sent word that strangers were not allowed to enter his village, but if they camped under a clump of trees he would give them food. Since they had no idea where they were, they did as they were told, ate the food they were given, and decided to wait until another ship passed by. To defend themselves they had just five muskets they had rescued from the wreck.
Manuel de Sousa sent one of his men to ask for a house for himself, his wife, and his two small sons. The king replied that he would lend him one, but only if his people split up among the local villages, since he could not feed them all. His chiefs, he added, would lead them to their new homes and would take care of them, but first they had to lay down their weapons. Ignoring the advice of a chief who warned the castaways to stick together—and the protests of his wife, who was made of stronger stuff than her husband—Sousa ordered his men to hand over their muskets.
“You lay down your arms,” Dona Leonor said sadly, “and now I give myself up for lost with all these people.”
The captain abandoned all pretense of leadership and told his people to make their own way home. He would stay where he was, he said, and die with his family if it pleased God. The Africans led the sailors in groups through the bush to their villages, where they stripped them, robbed them, and beat them. Back in the king’s village Manuel de Sousa, his family, five women slaves, and a dozen or so men who had stayed with him were relieved of their jewels and coins and were told to go and find the others.
Many of the scattered party had managed to regroup, but no one took charge. Without arms, clothes, or money they trekked across the arduous terrain, some taking to the woods, some to the mountains. The humiliated and half-delirious captain set off on their track with the rest of his weakening party, but they had barely started out when more Africans fell upon them, stripping them of their clothes and wounding Sousa in the leg. Dona Leonor tried to fend off her assailants with her fists, but her husband begged her to let herself be stripped, “reminding her that all are born naked and that, since this was the will of God, she should submit.” With her sons crying and begging for food she threw herself on the ground and covered her modesty with her long hair, scrabbling in the sand to bury herself to the waist. She refused to move, even when her old nurse gave her the torn mantle with which she was protecting her own dignity, and she never moved again.
The other men stood off in embarrassment. “You see how we are and that we can go no further, but must perish here for our sins,” Leonor said to one, the pilot of the wrecked ship. “Go on your way and try to save yourselves, and commend us to God. If you should reach India or Portugal at any time, say how you left Manuel de Sousa and me with my children.”
Most of the men shambled into the bush, while Sousa, his wound suppurating and his mind wandering, dragged himself off to look for fruit. When he came back, Dona Leonor was half faint from weeping and hunger, and one of his sons was dead. He buried the little body in the sand. The next day he returned to find the slaves crying over the corpses of his wife and his other son. He sent the women away and sat motionless, his chin resting on his hand, staring fixedly at his wife’s body. After half an hour he got to his feet, made a hollow in the sand, and buried the rest of his family. When he was finished, he disappeared into the bush and was never seen again.
Three of the women slaves managed to escape to Goa, where they told the sorry tale. Thirty-seven years later another Portuguese ship was wrecked not far away, and a local chief who came to see the castaways cautioned them not to travel overland, as thieves would rob and kill them. “He added that his father had warned Manuel de Sousa de Sepúlveda of this when he had passed that way,” a chronicler recorded, “and he was lost through not following his advice.” Instead the sailors waded out to an islet and camped in a deserted Portuguese settlement that had been built by ivory traders. As the sailors and soldiers began to bicker and fight, the captain—another Portuguese nobleman—shut himself up in a half-derelict hut and begged his men to leave him alone, “since he was old and weary, and finding himself with his wife in these straits, he determined to lead a hermit’s life there, passing the remainder of his days in penance for his sins.” Four years after that, another shipwrecked party behaved with much better discipline and marched overland for more than three months to meet up with the rest of their fleet. Along the way, they encountered an African who bowed and doffed his cap to their leader. “I kiss your worship’s hands,” he said, in the Portuguese manner; it turned out he had been brought up among the Portuguese survivors of the São João.
To superstitious sailors, the horror story of the São João, the half-witted Manuel de Sousa, and the tragic Dona Leonor kept resurfacing like a ghostly reminder of everything that had gone wrong. The hulking, unwieldy treasure ships disappeared at sea with terrifying regularity. Their captains, however noble, often proved desperately poor leaders. The indigenous peoples were inhospitable at best, and at worst they were seized with a violent loathing of the intruders. The climate wreaked havoc with European constitutions, and tropical diseases finished them off. The casualty figures were terrifying: twenty-five thousand patients died in the course of the seventeenth century at the Goa hospital alone. Around the Indian Ocean gravestones marked the deaths of countless young men taken before their prime. Countless more were buried or lost at sea, and the scars of absence were the only marks they left.
A Jesuit priest named Father António Gomes summed up the feelings of the unfortunate many. In the 1640s Gomes was himself shipwrecked on the Swahili Coast. He made his way to the nearest village and asked for the local chief. An old man with leathery skin and a gray beard appeared; Gomes cheekily suggested that he must have been around in Vasco da Gama’s days.
“I started to complain about the sea that had done us so much wrong,” the priest reported, “and he gave me an answer which I considered very wise.
“ ‘Master, if you know the sea is crazy and has no brain, why do you venture upon it?’ ”
EPILOGUE
IN 1516, AT the grand old age of sixty-four, Leonardo da Vinci moved to France. With him he brought three samples of his wares: two religious paintings and one enigmatic portrait that would become known as the Mona Lisa.
A tunnel linked Leonardo’s turreted manor house to the Ch�
�teau d’Amboise, the favored residence of the French king. Francis I was only twenty-two, but the two men saw each other nearly every day and became fast friends. When Leonardo died three years after his arrival, Francis cradled his head in his arms. “There had never been another man born in the world,” the king lamented, “who knew as much as Leonardo.”
The Renaissance had reached France. Born in the competing city-states of Italy, nourished by the splendors that flooded there from the East, and carried north on the winds of war, the intellectual transformation brought a new taste for learning and art to a nation obsessed by battle. Francis dispatched his agents to Italy to buy up paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts; they even tried to transport Leonardo’s Last Supper to France, wall and all. Magnificent palaces and castles shot up across his kingdom, including the Château de Chambord, the most astonishing hunting lodge in the world, which Leonardo himself may have had a hand in designing and where, in 1539, Francis hosted his bitter enemy Charles I of Spain.
The two men had a long history. Twenty years earlier the nineteen-year-old Charles had beaten the twenty-four-year-old Francis to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. They had been sworn adversaries ever since, so much so that Charles several times challenged the French king to single combat. Most woundingly to French pride, in 1525 Charles’s troops had captured Francis while both were vying for control of the Duchy of Milan, and the French king was carted off to Madrid and thrown in prison.
